The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2014 Edition

by Paula Guran [editor]

  Wakulla Springs is everything the Creature had hoped it would be. There are shortcomings, to be sure. He could have wished for a more tropical setting—strangler figs, lianas, and buttress-rooted trees—but there is much to be thankful for as well. The alligators slipping into the murky water recall the caiman of the Black Lagoon; the bulky manatees the nine-foot piracuru and catfish that call his native waters home; the boom of insects the constant roar of the jungle. And the springs themselves are fathoms deep and riddled with caverns. Against his better judgment—Julie will think him hardly human at all, he fears—the Creature dispenses with the pretense of his trailer and abandons the on-set catering altogether. Halfway abandons the film, in fact. More often than not, when Jack dispatches Bill to summon the Creature to the set, he’s off touring the depths. He explores the cave system in search of a rocky grotto like the one he had in the Amazon. He dozes in deep, cold currents where no human being can follow. He gluts himself on the abundance of prey, devouring fish raw in clouds of ichthyic blood. Life is good, or better anyway, but he is not happy (or if he is, he does not recognize it). Thoughts of Julie torture him like an inflamed scale under a ridge of his armored breast.

  Finally, Jack calls him in for a meeting. Like Karloff, Jack is a kind man. Anger is not his natural métier, yet the Creature is forced to stand dripping on the carpet in the director’s trailer, listening to his gentle rebuke. Somehow that makes it worse, Jack’s generosity of spirit. “I have no choice, you see,” the director admonishes him. “We’re on a tight schedule. We’re not making Gone With the Wind, you know.”

  “It’s going to be a good picture,” the Creature says.

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t going to be a good picture. I said that we have to make our release date or both our careers are on the line.”

  “Your career,” the Creature rasps. “What kind of career am I likely to have, Jack?”

  “You’re unique. After people see this picture, offers are going to come rolling in.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Jack. We both know there’s only one role I can play.”

  Jack sighs. “I guess you’re right. But still, this is going to be a good film. You’ll get to play this role again.”

  The Creature laughs humorlessly, snared in a dilemma even his human colleagues must share, forever trapped in the prisonhouse of self. That’s the appeal of acting, he supposes: the chance to be someone else, if only for a little while. And isn’t that what he’s doing here, playing at being something he’s not? He’s not a monster. He never has been. If his range of roles is limited—if he is doomed to be the Creature from the Black Lagoon--well that’s Hollywood. He thinks of Karloff and Lugosi. Who does he want to become? Does he wish to accept his fate with grace or does he wish to rail perpetually against it, strung out on drugs and bitterness? Is being the Creature any different than being a carnival freak? Yet still he longs for his lost home. How he hates the poachers who have done this to him. He’d like to poke their eyeballs out, too. And eat them.

  So maybe he’s a monster, after all.

  “I need you on the set on time,” Jack is saying while these thoughts run through the Creature’s head. “It’s expensive to shoot underwater, especially with the 3D rig. Every time you don’t show up when you’re supposed to, you cost us money.”

  “I’m sorry, Jack,” the Creature says.

  “Look, I know this is hard for you. Nobody ever said acting was easy. Look at Brando. Channel your anger into the role. I need you to be the Creature I know you can be.”

  The Creature doesn’t know quite what Jack means by this. He doesn’t even know who—or what—he is anymore. Yet he vows to himself that he will try for something more complex than a B-movie monster—to draw not only upon his fury and resentment, but upon his passion for Julie. He vows to do better.

  He does, too.

  The Creature shows up promptly as requested. He lingers between shots. He tries to make small talk with the crew. But what is there to say, really? He’s an eight-foot amphibian, finned and armored in plates of bone. He could eviscerate any one of them with the twitch of a talon. Monster or not, he is a monster to them.

  Not Julie, though, or so he tells himself. Perhaps Karloff is right: set against his natural environment, she seems to recognize his natural grace. Indeed she seems to share it. Unburdened by the clunky scuba tanks the men’s roles demand, she glides through the water. And between shots she dispenses with the bathrobe she’d taken to draping herself in on the Universal lot, as if swimming together has drawn them closer. Of all the actors on the set, she alone seems entirely at ease with him. They spend more and more time talking. As he lolls in the shallows, she tells him about her recent divorce and about growing up in Arkansas; she tells him about her first days in Hollywood, working as a secretary and taking voice lessons on the side. Yet she is still capable of blind cruelty.

  “You’re lucky,” she says. “You never had to fight for your dreams.”

  The Creature hardly knows how to respond. So what if Universal picked him up the minute William Alland laid eyes on him? Unlike Julie, he’ll never play another role in his life; all the elocution lessons in the world won’t change his inhuman growl. He’s not even sure what he aspires to anymore. Stardom? Freedom? A return to the Black Lagoon? In his dreams, he sweeps Julie into his embrace, carries her off to the Amazon, unveils to her the wonders of his vanished life: the splendid isolation of the Lagoon, the sluggish currents of the great river, the mystery of the crepuscular forest.

  Maybe this newfound intimacy accounts for the otherworldly beauty of the Wakulla scenes. In the dailies, Julie cuts the surface, her white bathing suit shining down through the gloom like god light. The Creature stalks her from below, half-hidden among drifting fronds of thalassic flora, rapt by her ethereal beauty. His webbed hands cleave the water. Bubbles erupt skyward with his every kick. As she swims, he glides toward her from below, up, up, up, until he is swimming on his back beneath her and closing fast: a dozen feet, half a dozen, less, his immovable face frozen in an expression of impossible longing. He reaches out a tentative hand to brush her ankle as she treads water—and pulls it away at the last moment, as terrified of her rejection on celluloid as he is terrified of her rejection in life. What one does not risk, one cannot lose; worse yet, he thinks, what one does not risk, one cannot gain. A sense of inconsolable despair seizes him. In the images projected on the screen, he sees now how little their worlds can connect. She is a creature of the daylit skin of the planet, he of the shadowy submarine depths.

  Jack praises the silent yearning in the Creature’s performance.

  Yet the whole thing drives the director crazy nonetheless. Frustrated by the task of stitching the haunting underwater scenes together with the mundane L.A footage, he asks the studio for reshoots and is denied. For the first time—the only time—the Creature sees Jack angry, his face a mask of fury. “This could be so much more than another goddamn monster flick,” he says in the dim projection trailer, flinging away the 3D glasses perched on his nose. Even this angry gesture drives home the Creature’s inhumanity. Alone in the back row, he must pinch his glasses between two delicate claws. His flattened nose provides no bridge to support them. He has no external ears to hook them over. Everything about him is streamlined for his underwater existence.

  The Creature grinds his cardboard glasses under one webbed foot. He slams out of the trailer, the door crumpling with a screech of tortured metal as he hurtles into the moonlit night. He is halfway to the water when Julie catches up with him. “Wait,” she says, “Wait—”

  Her voice hitches in the place where his name ought to be—for of course he has no name, does he? He is the Creature, the Gill Man, nothing more. There has been no one to name him—even the freaks did not name him—and he has never thought to name himself. He would not know how to begin. Fred? John? Earl? Such human names fall leaden on the tongue, inadequate to describe a . . . a creature, a fiend, an inhuman monster. How will they credit
him in the film? The Creature as the Creature?

  “Wait,” Julie says again. “Creature, wa—”

  The Creature whirls to face her, one massive hand drawn back to strike.

  “Don’t,” she whispers, and the Creature checks the blow. For an instant, everything hangs balanced on a breath. Then the Creature lowers his hand, turns away, and shambles toward the water, his great feet flapping. Something feels broken inside him. Jack’s words—

  —another goddamn monster flick—

  —echo inside his head. That’s all he is, isn’t he? A monster. A monster who in a moment of fury, would have with a single swipe of his claws torn from her shoulders the head of the woman he loved. A monster who would in the grip of his rage, feed upon her blood. The Creature would cry, but even that simple human solace is denied him. The dark waters beckon.

  “Wait,” Julie says. “Please.”

  Almost against his will, the Creature turns to face her. She stands maybe a dozen feet away. In the moonlight, tears glint upon her cheeks. Beyond her, the men—Jack and Dick and Richard Denning, the third lead—stand silhouetted against the beacon of golden light pouring through the trailer’s shattered door.

  “Why?” the Creature says, knowing the doom that will come upon him if he stays.

  “Because,” Julie says, “because I love you.”

  So Karloff was right. For a heartbeat, happiness—a great and abiding contentment that no mere human being can plumb—settles over the Creature like a benediction. But what is the depth of love, he wonders, its strange currents and dimensions? What is its price, and is he willing to pay it? And a line from another monster movie comes to him, one that Jack showed him in pre-production: It was beauty killed the beast.

  This is Hollywood.

  It vill fuck you every time.

  “I love you, too,” he says in his inhuman rasp, and in the same instant, in his heart, he recants that love, refuses and renounces it. For Julie. For himself. He will not be the monster that loves. He will not be the monster that dies. He will not be their freak, their creature. He will not haunt their dreams. They can finish their fucking film with a man in a rubber suit.

  The Creature puts his back to Julie and wades into the water, glimmering with moonlight. It welcomes him home, rising to his shins and thighs before the bottom drops away beneath him, and he dives. He has studied the locations, he has explored the Springs’ network of caverns: from here the Wakulla River to the Saint. Marks and Apalachee Bay, and thence to the Gulf. The Black Lagoon calls out to him across the endless miles, and so the Creature strikes off for home, knowing now how fleeting are the heart’s desires, knowing that Julie too would ebb into memory, this perfect moment lost, this happiness receding forever into the past.

  Dale Bailey lives in North Carolina with his family, and has published three novels, The Fallen, House of Bones, and Sleeping Policemen (with Jack Slay, Jr.), as well as a collection of short fiction, The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories. He has been a four-time finalist for the International Horror Guild Award, a two-time finalist for the Nebula Award, and a finalist for the Bram Stoker and the Shirley Jackson awards. His fiction has appeared in Alchemy, Amazing Stories, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Nightmare, SciFiction, and Tor.com, among other places. “Death and Suffrage,” his award-winning novelette, was adapted by director Joe Dante as part of the television series, Masters of Horror. He has two books due out in 2015, The End of the End of Everything: Stories and Acheron: A City in Seven Stories.

  What is in you is ancient as the black tar between stars.

  A void that howls in hunger and mindless antipathy

  against the heat of the living.

  TERMINATION DUST

  Laird Barron

  Let be be finale of seem.

  —Wallace Stevens

  Hunting in Alaska, especially as one who enjoys the intimacy of knives, bludgeons, and cords, is fraught with peril. Politically speaking, the difference between a conservative and a liberal in the forty-ninth state is the caliber of handgun one carries. Le sigh. Despite a couple of close calls, you’ve not been shot. Never been shot, never been caught, knock on wood.

  That’s what you used to say, in any event.

  People look at you every day. People look at you every day, but they don’t see you. People will ask why and you will reply, Why not?

  Tyson Langtree’s last words: “I tell you, man. Andy Kaufman is alive, man. He’s alive, bigger than shit, and cuttin’ throats. He’s Elvis, man. He’s the king of death.” This was overheard at the packed Caribou Creek Tavern on a Friday night about thirty seconds before bartender Lonnie DeForrest tossed his sorry ass out onto a snowbank. Eighteen below zero Fahrenheit and a two and a half mile walk home. Dead drunk, wearing coveralls and a Miners Do It Deeper ball cap.

  Nobody’s seen the old boy since. Deputy Newcastle found a lot of blood in Langtree’s bed, though. Splattered on the walls and ceiling of his shack on Midnight Road. Hell of a lot of blood. That much blood and no corpse, well, you got to wonder, right? Got to wonder why Langtree didn’t just keep his mouth shut. Everybody knows Andy Kaufman is crazy as a motherfucker. He been whacking motormouth fools since ’84.

  You were in the bar that night and you followed Langtree back to his humble abode. Man, he was surprised to see you step from the shadows.

  For the record, his last words were actually, “Please don’t kill me, E!”

  Jessica Mace lies in darkness, slightly drunk, wholly frustrated. Heavy bass thuds through the ceiling from Snodgrass’ party. She’d left early and in a huff after locking horns with Julie Vellum, her honorable enemy since the hazy days of high school. Is hate too strong an emotion to describe how she feels about Julie? Nope, hatred seems quite perfect, although she’s long since forgotten why they are at eternal war. Vellum—what kind of name is that, anyhow? It describes either ancient paper or a sheepskin condom. The bitch is ridiculous. Mobile home trash, bottom drawer sorority sister, tits sliding toward earth with a vengeful quickness. Easiest lay of the Last Frontier. A whore in name and deed.

  JV called her a whore and splashed a glass of beer on her dress. Cliché, bitch, so very cliché. Obviously JV hadn’t gotten the memo that Jessica and Nate were through as of an hour prior to the party. The evil slut had carried a torch for him since he cruised into town with his James Dean too-cool-for school shtick and set all the girlies’ hearts aflutter a few weeks before the Twin Towers crumbled a continent away.

  Snodgrass, Wannamaker, and Ophelia, the beehive-hairdo lady from 510, jumped between them before the fur could fly. Snodgrass was an old hand at breaking up fist fights. Lucky for Julie, too. Jessica made up her mind to fix that girl’s wagon once and for all, had broken a champagne glass for an impromptu weapon when Snodgrass locked her in a bear hug. Meanwhile, Deputy Newcastle stood near the wet bar, grimly shaking his huge blond head. Or it might’ve been the deputy’s evil twin, Elam. Hard to tell through the crush of the crowd, the smoke, and the din. If she’d seen him with his pants down, she’d have known with certainty.

  Here she is after the fracas, sulking while the rest of town let down its hair and would continue to do so deep into the night. Gusts from the blizzard shake the building. Power comes from an emergency generator in the basement. However, cable is on the fritz. She would have another go at Nate, but Nate isn’t around, he is gone-Johnson after she’d told him to hit the bricks and never come back no more, no more. Hasty words uttered in fury, a carbon copy of her own sweet ma who’d run through half the contractors and fishermen in the southeast during a thirty year career of bar fights and flights from the law. Elizabeth Taylor of the Tundra, Ma. Nate, an even poorer man’s Richard Burton. Her father, she thought of nevermore.

  Why hadn’t Nate been at the party? He always made an appearance. Could it be she’s really and truly broken his icy heart? Good!

  She fumbles in the bedside drawer, pushing aside the cell charger, Jack
’s photograph, the revolver her brother Elwood gave her before he got shredded by a claymore mine in Afghanistan, and locates the “personal massager” she ordered from Fredericks of Hollywood and has a go with that instead. Stalwart comrade, loyal stand-in when she’s between boyfriends and lovers, Buzz hasn’t let her down yet.

  Jessica opens her eyes as the mattress sags. A shadow enters her blurry vision. She smells cologne or perfume or hairspray, very subtle and totally androgynous. Almost familiar. Breathless from the climax it takes her a moment to collect her wits.

  She says, “Jack, is that you?” Which was a strange conclusion, since Jack presumably drifts along deep sea currents, his rugged redneck frame reduced to bones and sweet melancholy memories. All hands of the Prince Valiant lost to Davey Jones’s Locker, wasn’t it? That makes three out of the four main men of her life dead. Only Nate is still kicking. Does he count now that she’s banished him to a purgatory absent her affection?

  Fingers clamp her mouth and ram her head into the pillow hard enough that stars shoot everywhere. Her mind flashes to a vivid image: Gothic oil paintings of demons perched atop the bosoms of swooning women. So morbidly beautiful, those antique pictures. She thinks of the pistol in the dresser that she might’ve grabbed instead of the vibrator. Too late baby, too late now.

  A knife glints as it arcs downward. Her attacker is dressed in black so the weapon appears to levitate under its own motive force. The figure slashes her throat with vicious inelegance. An untutored butcher. It is cold and she tastes the metal. But it doesn’t hurt.

  Problem is, constant reader, you can’t believe a damned word of this story. The killer could be anyone. Cops recovered some bodies reduced to charcoal briquettes. Two of those charred corpses were never properly identified, and what with all the folks who went missing prior to the Christmas party . . .